My growing tech horizon

Kalzium-GSoC

I am making this post after 1.5 months after beginning my GSoC project and exactly 1 month after its official commencement. I have basically completed most of the work that I had planned. I have finished 3 calculator widgets and added them to the calculator widget along with the mass Calculator and the equation balancer which were already present.

Here are some screenshots where I have used the various calculators to solve a simple chemistry problem. (The problem is intentionally made very simple to attract a larger audience.)

Next step would be to calculate the molecular mass of Carbon Dioxide. (The usage of this widget is trivial, just enter the formula get the results)

Next we use the gas Calculator to find out the volume occupied by CO2 at the given conditions.

( Usage of the widget : seleect what you want to calculate using the radio button eg. volume, then enter required and relevant data. Not everything is compulsary. Select among the many units that are present)

Vand der Vaals constants have been set to zero because the gas is considered ideal. We get the volume of Carbon Dioxide.

We now use the concentration Calculator to calculate the concentration of the solution. First calculate its molecular mass.

Now for the concentration.

(Usage: specify all the data you have, not all are compulsary, eg density is unnecessary. You can select the way in which you specify amount (mass / volume / moles) You can specify a number of relevant units.)

There is also a nuclear Calculator that can answer questions simillar to the following one.

If initially 4 grams of Uranium-235 are present, after what amount of time will it reduce to 2 grams. ( Again the question is too simple but the calculator can do better problems.)

( Usage: select time from the radio buttons to calculate time. enter other data (initial and final amounts), selecting Uranium 235 automatically gets the halfLife from kalzium data. Thus we get the time required.)

You can also calculate final / initial amounts. You can specify time in halfLives using the slider which can vary from 0 to 10 half-lives.

I have gone through the plasma API FAQ and I have after some difficulty created plasmoid widgets for the same. These widgets are more difficult compared to the Qt ones because there is no equivalent of the awesome “Qt designer” for Plasma although it will be out soon.

The following is a plasmoid for the nuclear Calculator mentioned above. Looks cool doesn’t it?

Apart from that, I tried to use the Gnome Chemistry Utils library and create a new library called freeChem but it failed because, it wasn’t very easy to eliminate GTK from the code and put Qt instead. Now I plan to use the files in Kalzium itself to complete the molecular mass calculator.

Please feel free to ask any questions regarding the functioning / layout / ease of use of these widgets. Any suggestions are welcome. I have time for more Chemical calculators. If you have any ideas so comment.